More Websites in April Thanks Mainly to Google and Nginx

Netcraft's webserver statistics for April show over 230 million websites for April, six million more than in March.

A major share of the increase in websites is attributed to Google and Nginx. Apache continues in the lead at 46 percent of the market share with 106 million websites, adding one and a half million more from March to April, while losing very little in market share. Microsoft IIS is still in second place at 67 million and stable at 29 percent, adding about a million more sites.

In third place is Qzone that is behind the QQ IM server distributed in Asia. QQ produced a spike upward in February when Netcraft recorded 20 million QQ blogs. The webserver has now experienced double-digit growth in the last two months, reaching a 12.5 percent share in April at 29 million pages, but with not much effect on market share. The Google and Nginx servers almost single-handedly did have an effect, however. Together they added about five million more sites, although they still sit in fourth and fifth places, Google in fourth with seven million sites (3.1 percent) and Nginx in fifth with six million (2.6 percent).

A few smaller servers freshened up the April statistics. Their numbers may be relatively small, but Netcraft, the British Internet service, found them worth mentioning from the diversity of their programming languages. The Python-based Zope application server had 46,000 sites, the Mongrel Ruby server had 41,000, and the Pike and C-based Caudium server for dynamic websites came in at 14,000. The Erlang and Haskell languages are also trying to keep in stride: Erlang-based Yet Another Web Server (Yaws) has 70 sites and the Haskell-based Salvia lightweight server came in as newcomer with one new site.